Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: And everything old is new again

[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"]I don't know that there's much of anything new in terms of what has been developed as far as video games. I mean, while I happen to like <i>Half Life 2</i> and the "editions" it's still just an updating of the FPS with better graphics. It's not much different from what was done with <i>Doom</i> or <i>Quake III Arena</i>. Then you get rail shooters, and it's basically shoot anything that moves because you don't control the player, the game moves everything along. In the coin-op realm, I think <i>Area 51</i> was an interesting implementation of a rail shooter, if I remember it correctly. Next is the view-from-above fight a bunch of missions game like <i>Starcraft II</i>. It's okay if you can ease into it without it being impossible, but I've not really found that sort of game to be my cup of tea. An enhancement to any of the above is the multiplayer capability, which has been around for a long time and was really made popular, again, by <i>Doom</i>. But the big problem I often see is if the multiplayer offers competitive play mode, the really good players tend to quickly annihilate the lesser ones and there's not much fun because if you keep getting killed the instant you're either respawned or once you leave the safe area, you don't get much of a chance to learn how to play. Spawn Camping can be fun for the guy that uses it to grief other players, I suppose, but not much fun if you're the one chronically becoming instant cannon fodder. Now, one of the really innovative games to come along was <i>Portal</i>, which added a new wrinkle: the ability to move through 3D space by aiming a cross-surface teleporter from one spot to another and linking the spaces as if they were contiguous. This was a new and different idea. <i>Portal 2</i> adds a minor enhancement to the game by providing special surfactants for extra slipperiness, increased bounce capacity, and extra stickiness, if I remember the characteristics of all three. (Blue for bounce, Orange for slide, and white for sticky.) I was wrong, I looked it up, white allows portals to stick to places they don't normally. The example of something really new like <i>Portal</i> or even a good enhancement like <i>Portal 2</i> is very rare, and not often seen. But in most cases, it seems like most games being released just repeat the "same old, same old" that every other game does. Perhaps it has to do with the cost to develop a game, but you would think there is room to try and do something new every so often. But it doesn't really happen all that often. [/quote]